Hermann Joseph Muller

Hermann Joseph Muller (21 December 1890-5 April 1967) was an American geneticist and Nobel laureate who won the 1946 Nobel Prize for his work on X-rays and the creation of genetic mutations.

Biography
Hermann Joseph Muller was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1890, and he studied under Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. He was known to have a strong personality, and he worked at Morgan's Fly Room lab with Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant as a young man, perhaps being the smartest of the three. He later left Morgan's group to take a job at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and he was known to learn languages in two weeks. However, he felt that he was not getting the recognition that he deserved, so he decided to move to Britain and then to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Germany to study genetics. Muller decided that Nazi Germany was not the place to study, so he travelled to the Soviet Union, where the Soviets were attempting to develop better fruit and seeds through genetic experimentation. He went to Paris, to England, and eventually back to the USA. He was an early critic of the Eugenics movement, which sought to use genetics to improve human beings; Muller and Morgan were initially captivated by the idea, but they later came to oppsoe it due to its future ramifications. Muller whimsically decided to take the bottles of fruit fly larvae and expose them to X-rays to investigate mutations, lowering the dosages until he was able to expose the larvae and keep them alive. When the larvae popped out, Muller found dozens of flies with mutations, and that there was a specific dosage range in which humans could induce mutations within the larvae and fruit flies. He discovered that the radiation from X-rays were invisible, but could cause a physical change in the genes, and that humans could control hte ability of the insect's development, whether or not it was exposed to something manmade. For the first time in history, humans could change and alter the inheritance of a creature. Muller won the 1946 Nobel Prize for his work on X-rays and the creation of genetic mutations, a major discovery.